If you want to help them, empower them

When thinking about the future of social innovation, one has to go back to the core question of" what's the ultimate goal of social innovation?" From my point of view, the crucial goal of social innovation should finally come back to human dignity and independent development. As illustrated in my tile, if you want to help them, empower them. 

Apart from thinking about "what can we do to help them?",we have to keep in mind that social innovation in the long-term should mobilize and empower people to help themselves, instead of letting people receive outside resources passively and rely on good will of others forever. After addressing the basic need of local areas, social innovations should step back to be incubators for local people to develop their abilities,creativity, and imaginations.

Erick Njenga is a 21-year-old senior college student who is going to receive his business IT degree. In 2011, Njenga and his 3 classmates developed a program called "Integrated Disease Surveillance and response system", which has enabled thousands of health workers to use mobile phones to report and track the spread of diseases instantly. For Kenya, where one in 25 people is HIV-positive (10 times the U.S. rate) and AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria are among the leading killers, what Njenga and his classmates did was truly efficient and life-saving.

Their successful creation happened in the building of Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) in Kenya, where the four students talking with health staff about traditional ways of gathering information and discussed about designing an APP in mobile phones. This example is indicating that sometimes, with enough resources and social conditions, people in desperate situations can devise solutions to solve problems themselves which can be more direct and effective than governments and nonprofits.

In fact, there are already some social and business incubators in Africa, like the "iHub" in Kenya. Because these incubators are made of local skilled people in the local area, they have deeper understanding about the urgent problems and people there are more motivated and dedicated to solve the problems.

 

Interestingly, there are something similar happening in digital education technology area. It is called gamification. Simply speaking, it's a kind of techniques that put education into games to make learning more fun and engaging. Paul Anderson, who gave a ted talk called "Classroom Game Design" stated that gamification has unleashed students' self-motivation and curiosity to learn knowledge, try something new and explore the world. In the learning games, students become the big boss, and they can learn at their own time and pace and develop their interests without boundaries. 

An amazing example of gamification in education is the "Team Drill Head" directed by Mr.Pai, who is offering third grade class in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. In his classrooms, there are 7 laptops, 2 desktops,and dozens of PSPs.  Mr. Pai has adopted 18 games for teaching students about Math, Reading, Vocabulary and Geography. And those games include Flower Power, Timez Attack, Tutpup.com, etc, which are really fun to play and learn at the same time. 

Empowering people can create enormous energy for society, however, empowering people can be really difficult. When should we solve the problem for the local area and when should we let the people there get the stuff done by themselves? How can we motivate those people who are already in a desperate condition? What kind of specific conditions should we provide for them? 


SOURCE:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4qlYGX0H6Ec 

http://gamification.org/wiki/Gamification_of_Education

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/426983/kenyas-startup-boom/